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The world’s biggest security company, G4S, has been paid to train
thousands of UK Border Agency staff in “Keeping Children Safe” and continues to
do so despite its own record of harming people in its care,
and its apparent lack of any formal accreditation in such training.

The Home Office has confirmed to OurKingdom that G4S has trained some
7,800 UK Border Agency staff in safeguarding children — “particularly
within the Border Force who may come into contact with children entering and
leaving the country”.

The children may have been trafficked, sexually exploited, be facing
removal from Britain or they may be incarcerated in two government detention
facilities run for profit by G4S — Tinsley House at Gatwick Airport and Cedars
in the Sussex village of Pease Pottage.

The Agency's invitation to G4S in 2007 (there was no competition)
to provide such critical training, which continues to this day, is
extraordinary in view of the company’s lack of accreditation, its role running
detention facilities, and, most strikingly, in view of its own culpability in
repeatedly harming children and adults in its care.

Fifteen-year-old Gareth Myatt died in
April 2004 under “restraint” by three staff after he had refused to clean
the sandwich toaster at Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre near Rugby, run by
Rebound Children Services, a division of G4S.*

Horrible and shocking,
Gareth’s death at the privately-run child prison was no surprise. After the
Inquest in July 2007, the Coroner, Judge Pollard, wrote personally to then justice secretary Jack Straw to ensure that no other
child should be harmed by improper restraint methods, and to highlight the
remarkable failure of Rebound’s management to act on reports of abuses:

“Inadequacy in
the monitoring of the use of Physical Control in Care at Rainsbrook by Rebound
management caused or contributed to Gareth’s death,” wrote the Coroner. “We also
wish to record that there was a problem with the lack of response by Rebound to
the information from Rainsbrook.”

Gareth’s mother, Pamela Wilton, speaking after the Inquest, told the
BBC: "It
has been hard enough to accept what happened to Gaz. But hearing everything
that's come out . . . how long the injuries were going on, years of injury and
vomiting and kids complaining. I hope to see change to ensure that it doesn't happen
again, that kids are hurt."

The next person known to
have died under restraint by G4S was Jimmy Mubenga, a previously healthy
46-year-old Angolan man held down by two G4S guards on BA Flight 77 at Heathrow
Airport in October 2010.

In a chilling echo of
Gareth Myatt’s last words, Jimmy Mubenga was heard to say: "I can't
breathe, I can't breathe" for about 10 minutes before passing out, according to The Guardian. Two witnesses recalled
him saying: "They're going to kill me."

Staff cruelty to child
inmates at G4S Rainsbrook carried on after Gareth’s death. In
April 2010 a
G4S manager was sentenced to a 40 week suspended jail term for assaulting a
13-year-old boy in his care in September 2008. Northampton Crown Court heard
that 27-year-old team leader Neil Hanna dragged the boy along tarmac and then
up a flight of stairs causing severe abrasions to his buttocks.

Meanwhile, in the Border
Agency’s care, immigration detainees’ complaints of excessive force by G4S and
other commercial contractors were documented in Outsourcing Abuse, a dossier published
by the charity Medical Justice in July 2008. At G4S-run Tinsley House in
October 2009, a 10 year old girl tried to strangle herself.

G4S
is not a
dedicated provider of statutory, regulated, inspected or accredited
safeguarding children's services, yet, according to the
company’s own so-called “Case Study” *** of its training for Border
Agency staff: “In 2007 the
Immigration Minister identified nine principles which the UKBA Children’s
Champion Office had to follow in order to keep children safe from harm. As a
proven supplier to UKBA we were approached to partner the Agency in devising a
solution to this challenge.”

I asked both G4S and the Home Office to
provide details of the professional background and qualifications of the corporate
trainers. A G4S company spokesperson replied by email: “We have a team of trainers, who are all either
former qualified teachers, Police Officers or Police staff trainers. They all
have backgrounds in working with children or designing/delivering training that
is relevant to safeguarding children.”

The Home Office replied: “All the training team have
significant experience within the Justice sector.”

Asked how and by whom the
training is accredited, the Home Office replied: “The course was jointly designed by G4S and UKBA in
response to UKBA specifications.”

As for what evaluation took place, the Home Office offered only: “After
each course an evaluation is collected from delegates to summarise their
initial thoughts on the programme. Regular contract meetings are conducted.”

The G4S “Case Study” boasts that of the first 2000 workers who were trained, “over 99% . . . reported the course had met its aims and
objectives and 100% of delegates stated they had learned new information.” The Border Agency’s Learning and Development Manager, Lauren Ashton, “couldn’t have been more complimentary about the service we provided, stating
that we are like ‘an extension of their business.’” And: “The Children’s Champion Office has been delighted with the success
of the events.”

Leaving aside the fact that the
Border Agency is not supposed to be running a ‘business’, self-completed
questionnaires, florid compliments and the Children’s Champion’s delight are poor substitutes for rigorous independent evaluation.

“The Children’s Champion Office has been delighted with the success of the events.”

The Border Agency's Office of “Children’s
Champion”, which is supposed to
promote the safeguarding and welfare of children within the Agency, was itself heavily
criticised by the Serious Case Review Committee of the Bedfordshire Local Safeguarding Children Board
in June 2010, for failing to
intervene in the case of a child who was sexually abused at Yarl’s Wood
detention centre in Bedfordshire, denied appropriate medical examination
and therapeutic care, rushed out of Yarl’s Wood and removed from the
country.

Will the Border Agency's so-called Independent Family Returns Panel, or the Home Affairs Committee, or children's charity Barnardo's now take any action to ensure that the Border Agency commissions child safeguarding training from accredited and credible
providers?

As the G4S Case Study says: “Children have the right to be safe and it is
the responsibility of those working with them to ensure their right is maintained.
It is not acceptable for accidents and oversights to happen, however, several
well publicised cases have highlighted that they do.”

Notes

*** G4S Case Study

Shortly after publication of this article, the G4S Case Study PDF went offline; it is cached in html format here.

** Children and the UK Border
Agency

Thanks to pressure from the first Children’s Commissioner for England and
HM Inspectorate of Prisons, among others repeatedly highlighting multiple
deficiencies in the Border Agency’s treatment of vulnerable children over
years, mandatory training in child safeguarding for all Border Agency staff in
contact with children has been required since 2007.

That was
enshrined in the statutory guidance to section 55 of the Borders, Citizenship
and Immigration Act 2009, which gave the Border Agency a duty to promote and
safeguard the welfare of children.

The
equivalent statutory duty on other public bodies to safeguard children was
provided by Section 11 of The Children Act 2004 following the inquiry into the
death of Victoria Climbié, but the UK Border Agency and its predecessors
resisted these duties until they were imposed on them under section 55.

Children
subject to immigration control, including those held in immigration detention
in the UK, were excluded from the full rights and protections of the UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child until November 2008 when, under great
pressure, the UK withdrew most of its reservations to the Convention.

* Rebound, GSL and G4S

At the time of Gareth
Myatt’s death in April 2004 Rebound was a subsidiary of GSL, part of Group 4
Falck, the huge Danish security company that merged with Securicor in July 2004
to create Group 4 Securicor, rebranded in 2006 as G4S.

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